The Snowflake Iteration
by TheShoelessOne
Summary: Sheldon/Penny. Even life has a pattern. It's finding the threads that's the tricky bit.


**The Snowflake Iteration**

It's winter, and it's cold. Nebraska's cold. Not Bozeman cold, but full of ice and bright white snowflakes that turned to fractal-shadows when drifting through headlights. He is attempting to make a pattern, _see_ a pattern, trace the lattices with his warm fingertips from inside the windshield. They disappear in seconds. The wiper swishes by, leaves long wet streaks.

The passenger side of the windshield is pockmarked and wrinkled by notations, graphs, equations that had mapped out California, Nevada, the long prairies in the dark and, now, in the snow. He uncaps the marker, makes a notation of where the flakes had fallen, the movement of the wiper. His marker had followed the curve of the land, a slowly drooping line that reached a solid flat bottom—all across his window. He smudges mistakes away with his thumb. Seventy miles ago, he had pulled on his red hat with the earflaps.

He makes a point not to obstruct her view. He knows how sharply statistics of an accident spike when distractions in the visual field of the driver appear, no matter how slight. He's careful not to misplace a digit, to lose a signifier. He had asked for radio silence halfway to Reno, and she had grudgingly given it to him.

She had packed their food before the outset; he wouldn't eat from anywhere he hadn't pre-approved, most especially not fast food. Who knows where they'd had their hands? Where they got their tomatoes from? Don't get him started on condiments. And he had had her phone ahead for a list of ingredients to be used at the home in Nebraska, who would be cooking, how many times they washed their hands during preparation, what sort of raw meats would be involved, a double-checking of all the expiration dates on any food in the house; her mother had smelled all the produce personally.

"Penny," he says quietly. She doesn't look over, and he acknowledges that her eyes shouldn't leave the road in a winter weather situation. "I've organized a scatter plot but the distribution doesn't appear to correlate with the previous data."

"Maybe they're just snowflakes."

He laughs—chuckles, snickers—and is silent for a time as he analyzes the deaths of several more snowflakes. "Even life has a pattern. It's finding the threads that's the tricky bit."

She leads him up the driveway, all loose stones that crunch under snow and ice. He doesn't like to hold hands without gloves (the transfer of skin cells, accumulated mutual sweat) and so the cold weather is a plus for her. He claims a need to keep her from falling and injuring herself on the ice, therefore leading to a situation in which he would need to go out of his way to assist her. She tells him, in her own way, that he'd already proven himself quite capable.

His face is already pink from the cold, and she doesn't seem to be helping. Nevertheless, he keeps both long-fingered hands anchored to her.

He shakes the snow off of himself like a dog as Penny lets herself in, leading him by the hand into the dragon's den.

Penny remains close to him as if to shield him from the slings and arrows her family could fling at him, despite (as Sheldon leans down to inform her) she lacks adequate height and girth to protect him in any reasonable manner. She had learned to take these things as compliments, and, sometimes, as his attempts to be sweet. She's more enthused that he feels comfortable enough to rest his hands on her shoulders as he stands behind her.

Her mother's shorter than she is, all tight blonde curls that are losing their color. She has the same way of smiling that Penny does. But she has her father's eyes. He's a large man, not as tall as Sheldon but thick with muscle and a hanging beer gut. He has a mustache to rival Duvall. The sounds of football echo through the house, and the smell of dumplings.

Sheldon still hasn't removed his hat. With a nudge from Penny's elbow, his long arm reach up and snatch it away, straight-faced as always.

They had hardly believed the story of the first genius boyfriend, but when word came down the line of a _more_ genius boyfriend, they were sure that Penny (California Penny, Actress Penny, Penny of a Thousand Hopes and Dreams) was pulling their collective legs. She had already warned him of smiling too enthusiastically, she knew how many destructive tools her father kept stashed in secretive places for just such an occasion.

She calls him Sheldon, and he has to bite his lip and ball his fists to keep from correcting her—_Doctor_ Sheldon Cooper, _two_ PhDs, _theoretical physicist _ and owner of the largest collection of—but that wasn't the plan. They had drawn out a plan, checked over the agreement three times and amended the draft twice before an equitable arrangement could be found for both parties. He wouldn't worry about PhDs and she would inspect all of his food, find the perfect chair, armlock her father as Sheldon made a quick escape if the situation ever cropped up. Sheldon asked to include clauses for zombie invasion (nulled by the population of her town and the proximity to hubs of civilization—outbreak was unlikely within the three days of their trip) but she allowed for alien invasion possibilities (one can't deny the possible amount of crop circles when so much corn is involved).

He says most of the right things at dinner. He's still Sheldon, he can't change that for anyone (why should he? she wouldn't have him change it for the world) but her father brings up football and the boys are off. He knows more statistics of current teams than Sheldon does, but the boy holds his own (if Penny bit her nails, now would be the time). Her mother sighs, nods, says more than words could.

_A nice boy, Penelope. A nice boy who is going to need a fair share of work before he can be made into something marriageable. But nice. And smart. Rich? Enough. Happy? Are you happy, Penelope?_

She wakes to find him perched on the bedside table in his Tuesday pajamas, holding the end of the marker to his lips in thought as he stares out the window. Silver snow-light passes over his face, crinkled in deep contemplation; now and again he makes a notation on the window and retreats. She turns to face him, and he looks down once, then back to the window.

"It's a pattern. You fit into it, you know."

She humors him, props herself up on one elbow.

"Relationships form a pattern. Granted, humans can't behave like subatomic particles, so my equations had to be adjusted, but you fit remarkably well."

"_Homo novus_," she jabs, curling the blankets up around her.

He presses the tip of the marker to the window, connects dots to form a line, thinks it through.

"It radiates outward, centripetally. Rather than converging on an ultimate answer, they move away and branch out. Your mother and your father meet. Likely they met through mutual friends, seeing as the population of your town is miniscule enough... And they copulate and produce you." He draws another line, big blue eyes at calm in thought. "You move to California because none of the prospects of life here excite you. Or in attempts to copulate with an inferior mate."

Kurt, the big brick of man meat. She's surprised she remembers his name. Or that Sheldon would bring him up. Another line.

"You make acquaintance with myself and Leonard." He makes several lines. "On the other hand, your sister relocates, meets a man, produces children." He's become so occupied at the window that Penny rises from the warm bed to stand beside him, fit her arms under his, pull him close despite his instinct to retreat.

The pattern on the window, tiny little arms radiating outward and fracturing into branches (dots of black connected by heavy lines marking where the snow has hit the window and died) is the second-grader's awkward drawing of a snowflake. It might have been a spider crushed under a shoe, but knowing his arachnophobia it's meant to be a snowflake. And he looks so proud, beaming at her with that smile she's come to equate with science and whenever he spoke about her. She figures it was a little of both this time.

She presses warm lips to his cold forehead, something he still isn't used to (getting used to it, sometimes even lamenting when the gesture isn't given; he's been looking into the ramifications of this), cupping his cheek with one hand and beckoning with the other, leading him back to the bed.

"But Penny," he protests, his long legs unfolding from under him as he acquiesces fruitlessly, "I've not finished my calculations."

"But Sheldon," she reiterates, "I'm cold." She holds her arms out to him, sitting at the edge of the bed and smiling innocently up at him.

"Very well," he crumbles after the shortest pause, crawling in beside her and gingerly folding his arms around her. As if she might break. As if he might combust.

She wants to say _I love you, Doctor Whack-a-Doodle_, but she doesn't know what he'll do, how he'll take it. He buries his face in her hair, spoons the two of them close together, tells her that he knows because she talks in her sleep sometimes (more likely when she's consumed spicy foods or has been crying). He's asleep too soon because she wants to cry and tell him what he means to her. But it's a fact for him, she doesn't need her proof.

He catches snowflakes on his tongue, watches them melt as they hit his coat, his fingertips. Smiles when she leaps off the porch after him and welcomes the warm embrace. His lips are cold (dotted with snowflakes, like the rest of him) when she tugs him down by his collar. He lets her—he's stiff and awkward and maybe a little bit scared, but he's trying. Oh, they'll get the hang of it.

* * *

AN: I don't know where it comes from. Gosh, I just write it as it comes. But I love these kids, I love that they're taking over my brain to make me write things. Also, this was written to the soundtrack from A Beautiful Mind, dunno if that helps or not. But I hope you enjoyed, hope it's not too OOC or whatnot, I am just on such a S/P kick. Leave us some love, and most definitely STAY AWESOME. Also, I just realized this is my 100th story. Gosh. Well, congrats, Shenny, for being the ones to scoop up the honor!


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